Cuba's Terror Smoking Gun

Terrorism: For years, Cuba's apologists have debunked U.S. warnings of Havana's sponsorship of terror. It withers in the face of news that Cuba has just set up a Hezbollah base.

According to a report in Italy's respected Corriere della Sera Wednesday, three Hezbollah terrorists operating out of Mexico have left that country to establish a permanent "bridgehead" to the communist island, calling their clandestine operation "The Caribbean Dossier."

Twenty-three other terrorists from the Iran-linked terror group are expected to join the operation, which has a startup budget of more than $500,000. Corriere reported that the mission in Cuba is to provide logistical support for upcoming terrorist attacks planned in the hemisphere.

This is what "state sponsor of terrorism" means, which is how the U.S. accurately classified this odious regime since 1982, even as Cuba's leftist apologists have dismissed it, claiming Cuba is no threat.

Safely ensconced with the Castro brothers' hospitality, Hezbollah's operatives can carry out missions such as acquiring passports, recruiting informants and forging documents.

More disturbingly, they have been tasked to network with Hezbollah's other terrorist cells in Venezuela, Paraguay and Mexico, all in need of logistical support for attacks.

The Italian newspaper reported that Hezbollah might be planning a major attack against Israeli targets in the Western Hemisphere in retaliation for Israel's killing of Hezbollah's chief assassin, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus in 2008. Mughniyeh was a Hezbollah terrorist leader implicated in the two huge attacks in Buenos Aires in the 1990s on Jewish targets — strikes that remain unpunished.

But the targets might not all be Latin American. With Hezbollah ordered to meet with, presumably in Havana, Mexico's cartel traffickers that control illegal alien routes into the U.S., it's likely terrorist attacks are in the works for America, too.

"Once you create the networks, the guerrillas will be held ready for their missions," Corriere reported of Hezbollah's orders.

That's classic terrorist networking coming into a place before a scourge emerges.

Make no mistake, it's the Castro dictatorship that's enabling Hezbollah. More to the point, it corresponds with the fact that the Castro brothers have always opened the doors wide to terrorist operatives — from Colombia's FARC, M-19 and ELN terrorists, to Chile's leftist terrorists of the Allende era, Nicaragua's Sandinistas and Spain's ETA Basque operations.

The Castro brothers have long been champions of Hezbollah, and there are no more "professionally trained" terrorists capable of carrying out large attacks than Hezbollah operatives.

Against all this, the Cuban regime screams whenever the State Department awards it the designation of state sponsor of terror. Just last week, Cubadebate.com, a Cuban state-controlled media organ, said the U.S. used "old, unprovable arguments" in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism 2010 that gave Cuba the terror title it deserves.

What's outrageous is that the left has consistently echoed this line. Just last year, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote:

"Cuba poses no terror threat. Cuba is not a failed state with territories out of governmental control. The idea that a Cuban citizen could get explosive artifacts or have terror accessories of any kind in the island is simply ridiculous."

Filmmaker Michael Moore, academic Noam Chomsky, Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin and quite a few elected officials have made similar statements.

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